It's easy to enjoy the game more

Community General Discussion
1

Hey everyone,

So I have been playing this game for almost 20 years now, started July 2005, but I wanna take you along in the pitfalls that I learned already in vanilla and fell a little bit back to at the start of this expansion. So in vanilla I was gladly able to join one of the top guilds on Azjol Nerub and we did everything BWL, AQ40 everything besides C-thun and 6/13 Naxx. I also got rank 11 in pvp. However, although it was fun, I was 16 at the time, I also learned that it had a drawback to be so invested in the game and already started to understand the overfocus on gear and items (or in other words, the dopamine gratification) had some negative sides to the game. As it created frustration towards the people around me. So since TBC I played more casual and just found joy in other things than the hyper focus on wanting the best gear and wanting to be the best.

Now with the release of TWW, I sorta fell back into that mode in the first few weeks, I put in a lot of time to just prepare for the start of the season and get ready for especially M+. What I did the last few seasons is to set myself a goal for KSH and a gearscore to aim for. I forgot doing that and started to feel the frustration when a key would deplete or losing a roll or not receiving the gear I wanted. Of course, I am much older now, so after noticing this, I just took a week off and thought of what went wrong.

In that week, I started to think of what makes me enjoy this game, and that comes down to just playing with my friends. Next to that my focus changed, I put myself as a goal this season KSH and gear level 625. It will probably turn out higher due to playing with my friends, however, I don’t care about the gear, and I also do not want to have any frustration on that upgrade/gear treadmill.

Reading the WoW forums is interesting, cause I see so much frustration that is sorta recognizable but also so easy to prevent. Yes, WoW changed over the years, but so did life itself. I personally don’t watch TikTok or instagram stories cause it destroys your dopamine levels so much, and well causes for the focus on instant gratification.

Anyways I like TWW, however I sometimes miss a day of slow leveling but gladly there is classic era for that. There is more to WoW than just end game or improving your Itemlvl.

2 Likes
2

:beers:

I couldn´t agree more. 20 Years ago it was all about go fast go hard… Now, when the season starts I set myself a target GS as you do, knowing that curve, 2500 rating and Close-to BiS will inevitably come over the course of a season as we progress into early (and hopefully mid-late) mythic, there´s absolutely no reason to stress myself to the breaking point… all it will do is make the game a boring farm that much faster if I fo full sweatlord early on and race to achieve my season goals and force me to play mroe alts (which isn´t necessarily a “bad” thing, but I kind of prefer to play my main for the most part)

That´s not to say I don´t do a hard(er) initial push, but for ex. I don´t see a reason to break my sanity spending half the week doing 8x 10s just for the vault in week one when I´m still running around in Adventurer /Veteran and champion gear (or last season hc /mythic) and our goal for the first 3 weeks is to just smash through NHC 2x /week until we all have the skip on our main and main-alt and to make sure people understand the basics before moving into HC. :wink:

If I were still in a HoF guild or had the goal to actively progress Mythic from week 1, then yes, I would push harder… But the way I see it, I had my time in the limelight 20 years ago with inHarmony, others can dance in it now, I just wanna have fun and look good doing it :beers:

1 Like